Velvet Goldmine (1998)

Todd Haynes made a film in 1998 about a bisexual glam rock star who fakes his own death, and then spends two hours letting everyone talk about him. The structure borrows from Citizen Kane, the costumes borrow from Biba, and the moral center borrows from Oscar Wilde, who appears as the patron saint of men who dress well and love badly. Brian Slade discusses his bisexuality openly in the press. Curt Wild is a Michigan trailer park Iggy Pop carrying Lou Reed's electroshock scars. Arthur Stuart, the journalist, has a sexual encounter with Wild that the film treats as a quiet, formative fact. This is a queer text from the first frame to the last. It is not, however, a diverse one. Eddie Izzard appears as the manager Jerry Devine, and the film is built on gender-nonconforming performers, yet the ensemble stays almost entirely white, and Little Richard registers as an influence and a footnote instead of a presence.

The film's politics are the politics of the dressing room. It has things to say about the music industry's appetite for repackaging its rebels, which lands hardest when Slade resurfaces as Tommy Stone, a Reagan-era conservative pop star in a suit. That is a gesture at commodification, not an economic polemic. Mandy Slade gets real screen time and real damage, but she exists to illuminate her husband. Androgyny and nudity are celebrated throughout, though the celebration concerns sexual liberation, not bodies of different sizes.

The film never lectures. Haynes is a moody, non-linear filmmaker who trusts allusion, and any message sits inside the velvet and the feedback. There is no climate anxiety here, no neurodivergence, no revisionist claim about the historical record. Just a sad man in a green brooch, remembering a decade that probably never happened the way he remembers it.